The hottest Risk modeling Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
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Top Finance Topics
The Honest Broker Newsletter • 1776 implied HN points • 26 Jan 26
  1. Estimated annual catastrophe losses rose sharply in nominal dollars from 2020 to 2025, but much of that increase is driven by greater exposure — more construction and higher construction prices — rather than clear evidence of climate-driven loss growth.
  2. When losses are measured as a share of global GDP, weather-related disaster losses have not increased since 1990 and were below the long-term average in 2025.
  3. Different firms produce different loss totals and insured-loss numbers are more reliable than total loss estimates; to detect climate signals you should look at climate data rather than economic loss data, and keeping disaster impacts low will require continued effort.
The Honest Broker Newsletter • 3660 implied HN points • 08 Dec 25
  1. Property/casualty insurers are earning record profits and strong underwriting gains, so the industry is financially healthy despite media claims of collapse.
  2. Underwriting returns swing up and down year-to-year but show no long-term trend, meaning insurers are not in a systemic underwriting crisis.
  3. A booming climate‑risk vendor industry produces wildly different risk models, and those uncertain assessments have helped justify big insurance rate hikes even though the direct climate-driven increase in losses appears small.
The Honest Broker Newsletter • 2227 implied HN points • 15 Dec 25
  1. The financial sector framed a new category called "climate risk" and built a regulatory and commercial ecosystem around it, treating it as a novel systemic threat to global finance.
  2. That risk has been measured mainly by economic losses from extreme-weather events, which often mixes up rising damages with actual changes in weather rather than accounting for exposure and vulnerability.
  3. Financial actors argue historical climate data is a poor guide and have pushed new scenarios, models, and private vendors to quantify "climate risk," creating a large market influence despite questions about the scientific basis.
The Honest Broker Newsletter • 1315 implied HN points • 12 Dec 25
  1. Insurance companies are making record profits even as headlines claim a climate-driven insurance crisis, and recent premium hikes seem driven in part by rules to account for “climate risk” and the growth of risk-modeling services.
  2. The issue presents data across many areas — dark oil tankers, moderates’ confidence in science, an energy skills gap, red-state/blue-state electricity price differences, southern-hemisphere wheat, and a comeback of climate-realist views.
  3. More analysis is coming, including a follow-up on insurance and climate and a ranked list of major climate-research scandals, and the full material is available to paying subscribers.
Gordian Knot News • 146 implied HN points • 22 Jan 26
  1. Saying "no detectable harm" is the same as "zero harm" is misleading: biological repair can make extra radiation damage undetectable but not literally zero, so a tiny nonzero risk can remain.
  2. Competing harm models (like LNT versus repair-aware models) produce vastly different low-dose risk estimates, so claiming absolute zero harm invites logical and rhetorical attacks and weakens your position.
  3. For regulation and to avoid crippling tort liability, the industry needs a clear, quantitative radiation-harm model to calculate compensation and make nuclear power economically viable even when releases cause no detectable health effects.
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